Below

Below, 2002. Directed by David Twohy. Bruce Greenwood, Olivia Williams, Holt McCallany, Jason Flemyng, Matthew Davis, Jonathan Hartman, Dexter Fletcher, Scott Foley.

Synopsis: During World War II, the submarine U.S.S. Tiger Shark picks up a trio of survivors from a British hospital ship on the open sea. The Tiger Shark has been shadowing an unseen enemy sub and is being harried by ships on the surface. The survivors, relate their tale of being torpedoed by a U-boat. One of the survivors is a German, a fact that enrages the acting commander of the Tiger Shark, Lt. Brice. Brice summarily executes the German after he becomes convinced that he's giving away their positiion to the enemy. Nurse Claire Paige sees that there is something clearly amiss aboard this sub, a mystery that deepens when she begins to inquire as to the fate of the Tiger Shark's absent captain. Meanwhile, strange occurrences are fraying the nerves of an already frightened crew. Is there a ghost aboard the Tiger Shark? After avoiding the chains of a enemy ships on the surface, a team of divers is sent out into the space between the inner and outer hulls to find an oil leak. They find...something...and one of their number doesn't return. Soon, one by one, crewmen begin to die and the rudder of the submarine takes on a life of its own...

When the Sea Gives Up it's Dead: Miramax's genre division, Dimension, released this unassuming creep-out in less than 300 theaters. Around the same time, Warners put their competing Ghost Ship into wide release, and The Ring was confounding the expert analysis of box office prognosticators. One assumes that Dimension didn't have faith in the ability of this movie to compete in the marketplace against similar movies, which, combined with their release of Halloween: Resurrection in July, just goes to show that the only competent people in Miramax's marketing department work exclusively on Oscar campaigns. There are rumblings that Harvey Weinstein didn't get along with director and Weinstein certainly has enough ego to sabotage the film. Below is a pretty good movie, one that could have done well at the box office if it hadn't been torpedoed by its own distributor. Fortunately, good horror movies have a long half-life. I suspect that Below will outlive Ghost Ship in the minds of horror fans, if only because its execution is so much better.

Set-Pieces: Had Below been made during the classic studio era of Hollywood, it might have been made at RKO for producer Val Lewton. It has some of the feeling of a Lewton production, including an oblique approach to the supernatural, an ambiguity about its ghost, and a story structure built around a couple of devastating set-pieces. Twohy has a knack for set-pieces, actually (the scene with the scorpions in The Arrival, for one; the space-ship crash in Pitch Black for another), and without suggesting that Twohy is the second coming of Jacques Tourneur, I'll set this film's set pieces against some of the best in the genre. The first of these is an extended exercise in submarine warfare that may be the best submarine battle ever put on film. The fact that the film is milking this type of warfare for a different sort of fear and dread than usual only adds spice to the proceedings. When the depth charges hit the water, they are terrifying in a way that no other film I can remember matches, and the following sequence where the ships on the surface are dragging the water with hooks is even more effective. The film's second set-piece, one that follows logically from the first, follows a trio of divers into the hull. This is the film's best sequence, one that wrings every ounce of suspense from its setting. A more frightening place would be hard to imagine, and nevermind the ghosts. The third set piece is of a different sort, when the arcing ships batteries set fire to a compartment that is flooded with oxygen. The way this sequence is edited is a brilliant example of the Val Lewton technique of letting the audience fill in the blanks, but it one-ups the audience's worst fears. It's one of the most horrifying sequences in recent film, and the worst of it happens offscreen, with nary a peep to brace the audience for what's to come.

To an extent, the supernatural aspects of the film seem almost an afterthought, even as they drive the engine of the plot. In a lot of ways, this film resembles The Devil's Backbone in the way it contrasts the horrific reality of war with the conventions of the horror movie. The mating of the submarine setting and the ghost story is so ideal that one wonders why no one has ever put a story like this on film before (there is an old Twilight Zone episode about a submarine, but it's substantially different than this film).

The film's not perfect, though. The plot, as it's revealed, is a standard horror movie plot and a transparently obvious one at that. This is compounded by the abandonment of the ambiguity that informs the first half of the film. The lack of any profoundly frightening shocks harms the film somewhat, but the mounting dread of its setting ameliorates this.

The cast of the film is excellent, filled with talented actors who you've probably seen but can't place. Olivia Williams and Bruce Greenwood are the most recognizable faces, and form the sides of the film's primary conflict. Williams is wonderful; Greenwood is less so: his interpretation of Captain Queeg and Captain Bligh is overwrought and tips the movie's hand early on. None of the cast members upstages the director, though. When you see a battleship reflected in Bruce Greenwood's blue eye through a periscope, it's a flourish that asserts the primacy of David Twohy in this production. Since ghost stories feed on style and mood, it's probably just as well...